Alone with the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller. James Nally

took Peter’s keys and spoke first. ‘Who else has a set?’

      ‘Just me and … Marion,’ said Peter, his voice cracking at the mention of her name.

      ‘We’re fetching a car for you and your colleague. I’m afraid we need statements from both of you tonight.’

      Peter just stared into space.

      ‘Where can you go after the police station?’ asked Clive. ‘Have you got family near here?’

      Peter shook his pale face mournfully. ‘The only place I can go is to Marion’s mum and dad up in Enfield.’

      Clive and I exchanged frowns.

      ‘Do you think that’s wise, son?’ asked Clive. Peter looked at him blankly.

      ‘Okay,’ said Clive, ‘first I’ve got to get officers round there to tell them the news.’

      ‘Oh Jesus,’ Peter gasped and we all baulked. Every parent’s worst nightmare: the death knock. Peter walked slowly away from us but I could hear every word. ‘Oh Jesus, Jesus,’ he muttered, over and over.

      A sudden deafening bellow made us jump. Peter’s wails were primeval, from the very core of his being. My mind flashed back to the time the Dalys’ prize-winning cow died howling in their shed. I’m sure their mother said she’d developed gangrenous teats. I couldn’t drink milk for a month after.

      I turned to Clive: ‘If he did it, he surely wouldn’t go and stay with her family.’

      ‘He’s either innocent or one hell of an actor,’ said Clive, ‘I mean look at him, he’s shivering like a shitting dog.’

      ‘Maybe he’s racked with guilt. She must have known her killer. She let him in.’

      ‘And it must have been a man,’ said Clive, ‘I mean, just from the point of view of strength. It’s always the man, isn’t it?’

      ‘They were only married thirteen months,’ I said, ‘I just don’t see it.’

      ‘Neither did she,’ deadpanned Clive, chuckling as he set off across the road. I wondered if that’s what happened to all cops, in the end.

      I couldn’t just leave Peter like that, bent double, bawling at the pavement. I walked over and put a hand on his heaving shoulders. He calmed almost instantly. I couldn’t think of a thing to say, so I said: ‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’

      He breathed in deeply.

      ‘Thank you, Officer,’ he blurted, and I could tell he meant it, before the spasms of grief swept him away once more.

      As the car taking Peter and Karen to Clapham police station moved off, a flash of streetlight illuminated the interior. Freeze-framed in the back seat, Peter’s ghostly white face stared straight ahead, as if into an abyss. How I longed for a glimpse inside that mind. On the far side of him, two large teary eyes gazed into his. Then, for a nanosecond, the eyes of Karen Foster locked onto mine, glinting wounded confusion.

      The murder scene buzz snapped off like a light. A sense of helplessness gnawed away at my red-raw nerves.

      ‘Go home, son, you look shattered,’ said Clive, and I lacked the will to argue.

      It was less than a mile to the flat I shared with Aidan, an old friend from back home.

      Aidan was a psychiatric nurse at the Maudsley hospital, and on ‘earlies’ that week. But I guessed he’d still be up, chain-smoking his Marlboro Reds, noodling on his guitar, crafting a ballad to the latest random woman he’d fallen in love with at the bus stop or in some supermarket queue, the soft eejit.

      Like so many gifted musicians I’d known, Aidan existed in a perpetual emotional state of either unrequited love or rejection. It was as if he’d absorbed the lyrics of all the epic love songs he’d ever learned so that they became his doomed emotional landscape. Any girl he got off with instantly became ‘the one’ – cue a week of Van Morrison (early era), Stone Roses, The Sugarcubes. Then his intensity would scare her off, making her ‘the one who got away’ – cue a week of Van Morrison (late era), Nick Cave and Tom Waits in his locked smoky bedroom. If music be the food of love, Aidan ate only sweet ’n sour.

      His self-inflicted lovelorn existence, coupled with the fact he didn’t drink or take an interest in sport, outcast Aidan from the rest of our circle. But his tendency to get depressed worried me, so I’d always kept in touch. When the cash-in-hand, hard-drinking madness of the North London Irish scene became too much, I ‘retired’ to South London and Aidan’s calm exile. ‘Be good training for when you move in with a woman,’ the lads joked.

      Aidan’s emotional pogo would be too much for me tonight. I elected to walk home, nice and steady, so he’d be asleep by the time I got there.

      The lightest of rain filled the air, cool and gentle, as if a weary cloud had sunk upon the road. ‘Soft rain, thank God,’ the old boys back home would say. The streets went slick. Car wheels sizzled like frying pans. The night buses groaned and closing time laughs rang hollow.

      A lonely phone box cast piss-green light upon the wet pavement. I stared through the scratched glass at the grubby phone inside. I wanted to call her right now, badly. But how could I, at this time of night, after two long years?

      I walked on, unable to fathom why seeing Marion’s body had affected me so much. God knows, like any young Irish adult, I’d seen more dead bodies than Ted Bundy’s chest freezer. It’s nothing sinister – at least not to us. It comes down to one stubbornly lingering Irish tradition: the Wake.

      I remembered comedian Dave Allen’s line: In Ireland, death is a way of life. Whenever someone dies, we lay them out in their coffin and look at them for a few days. Tradition demands that the body is accompanied at all times until its ‘removal’ to the church. Cue an endless stream of relatives and neighbours through the house, a reservoir of tea, a landfill of sandwiches. From the age of seven or eight, every time a relative croaked it – and my extended clan was massive – you were hauled along to the Wake to say goodbye to someone you didn’t know who was already dead.

      Before the corpse is displayed to all and sundry – usually in a bedroom or the sitting room of their home – some poor soul has to wrestle them into their Sunday best, wrench their eyes and mouth shut, apply make-up, and discreetly stuff cotton wool up their nostrils so that they don’t cave in. You never seemed to meet an embalmer socially.

      In some homes, clocks are stopped at the time of death and all mirrors turned to the wall. Once the coffin is hauled into its display position, the family opens the window, to allow the deceased person’s spirit to leave. After two hours, they close the window, to ensure that the spirit doesn’t return. If you stand between the window and the body during this time, then God help you.

      I shuddered at the memory of that open landing window tonight. Did Marion’s spirit pass through me?

      I scolded myself for entertaining such superstitious nonsense. My thoughts turned instead to Marion. I knew that every square inch of her body would be poked and prodded, then photographed, scraped, swabbed or cut open. Body fluids, fingernail dirt and pubic hair would be sealed in plastic or glass and then passed, hand to hand, along the evidential chain; from pathologist to the laboratory, to the prosecution, to the court and to the jury. When you become the central piece of evidence in your own murder, there’s no dignity. Poor Marion – probably worrying about what to make for tea when she got to her front door. I tried to block out how she must have felt the moment she saw the knife. How could someone she knew do this to her?

      Then I thought about Eve. Another blazing redhead ambushed by evil.

      I rubbed my eyes. The soft rain had made my face all wet.

      Eve Daly was more Irish-looking than any woman has a right to be: mischievous green eyes; a pale, sculpted face with just enough freckles; wild hair as red as the flesh of a blood orange. Sexy, curvy, five foot five in heels, her nose crinkled when she laughed, she smelled of pine needles